


Never Get Enough

by perfectpro



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Succubi & Incubi, Succubus Caroline Forbes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-19 00:53:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29866668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectpro/pseuds/perfectpro
Summary: After a run in with a witch who promises to transform the very nature of her survival, Caroline needs to feed off of pleasure instead of blood. The only problem is finding a source strong enough to survive her.
Relationships: Caroline Forbes/Klaus Mikaelson
Comments: 27
Kudos: 120





	1. A Kind of Emptiness

**Author's Note:**

> Fic name and all chapter titles are from Florence + The Machine's Hunger
> 
> Told myself I was going to take a break on account of my life being super busy and then suddenly couldn't tear myself away from this fic concept.
> 
> The amazing banner was made by [destellolunar](https://destellolunar.tumblr.com/)!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The witch announces, “I think I might have the perfect solution for you. No more blood, no more death. I can change the very nature of your survival.”
> 
> Sober Caroline would realize that things that sound too good to be true often are.
> 
> She’s drunk, though, and she doesn’t get that far.
> 
> “Really?” she checks, eyes wide with disbelief.

  


Caroline is more than sixty years old, and an age of that significance should come with some kind of wisdom. Or at least a bit more common sense than she’s apparently acquired by now. Maybe she does have common sense, but not when she’s drunk. Sober Caroline? A superstar, a sober sponsor, the picture of restraint. When she’s drunk, it’s a bit of a different look.

Drunk Caroline likes to make friends, likes to tell stories, and what better place to tell those stories than a bar in the New York City supernatural underground? At least there she doesn’t typically have to compel anyone to forget or worry about fudging the details.

Which is how she ends up seated next to a witch and talking through her transition.

“So she was identical to my best friend, and she just comes into my hospital room and kills me. I had trust issues for a while, especially once I found out that both of my best friends knew about vampires and neither had thought to tell me that I was basically operating as a human blood bag for her boyfriend’s brother. They were both vampires, by the way. Not my best friends, just the boyfriend and his brother. Who was kind of my boyfriend at the time, but now they’re married! Well, he’s married to one of my best friends,” she announces, pulling out her phone to show off Elena and Damon’s admittedly cute wedding photos.

They have two kids now, and their first grandchild is due in March, and the family photos are almost as cute, but that’s not quite the point she’s trying to make here.

The witch leans forward and nods. “They’re adorable,” she agrees amenably enough. Tossing her hair over her shoulder in a beautiful, red, wavy waterfall, she signals to the bartender for another round. “That must have been really hard on you.”

Caroline accepts the drink that gets passed to her and takes a small sip. A paloma with tequila and the citrusy-sour taste of grapefruit lingers on her tongue. “I kind of hated them all for a bit. Not exactly a walk in the park,” she allows.

She’s turned two vampires since leaving Mystic Falls, and with each of them she talked them through the entire experience beforehand to make sure they knew what they were getting into. No waking up from apparent death without understanding the bloodlust that lingered in her throat. Attacking that woman in the hospital without reason still comes up in the occasional nightmare. Consensual vampirism is the name of the game.

“Magic was a lot easier to adjust to, I expect. It doesn’t require sacrifice unless you demand too much of it,” the witch (did she say her name was Daphne? Delphine? Delores? did she say her name at all?) comments, a good point that she’s never truly considered before.

Bonnie has given up things for magic, but only for things that she was willing to bargain for. Caroline’s very existence demands blood and pain.

She says as much, “I wish that I didn’t have to survive on blood. Like, what if I could just eat happiness instead? No death, just going to the beach and getting all the relaxed vibes. That’d be awesome.” She tries to picture it, no more feeling guilty about the bunny diet or about doing the catch, compel, and release with tourists that she’s gotten into more recently.

The witch gives her a slow and almost triumphant smile, showing all of her blindingly white teeth, and she raises her glass. As opposed to Caroline’s pink drink with an umbrella sticking out the side, she has something clear and sour-smelling with a hint of spice. The ice cubes rattle together as she announces, “I think I might have the perfect solution for you. No more blood, no more death. I can change the very nature of your survival.”

Sober Caroline would realize that things that sound too good to be true often are. She’d ask particulars, take some time to think about it, and probably come to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be worth it.

She’s drunk, though, and she doesn’t get that far.

Gasping, Caroline lifts her own glass and does the only due diligence that she can think of. “Really?” she checks, eyes wide with disbelief.

“Really,” the witch promises her, beautiful and alluring, and that’s apparently good enough.

Their glasses slam together, and Caroline downs the last of her paloma before declaring, “Let’s do it.”

-x-

Which is how she comes to consciousness in a circle of salt, the witch standing outside it with a leather-bound grimoire cracked open in her hands.

“How do you feel?” she asks, looking through mossy green eyes at the blonde who is still rolling her neck out. The witch looks a bit more haggard than she had the previous night, bags under her eyes and hair limper than before, Caroline doesn’t know how much she’d been drinking before she got there. Plus, she just did a spell of unknown origins to swap out the very nature that vampires is contingent upon. That probably takes a lot out of a person.

Caroline pauses before she answers, taking stock.

Her senses are definitely still vampiric and not human, but her throat doesn’t burn. Not necessarily unusual in and of itself, as she takes care to make sure she isn’t hungry when she’s around people. A blood bag a day keeps the drained humans away, or something to that end.

When she concentrates, she can hear the witch’s heartbeat, but it wasn’t the first thing that she noticed. With every human that she encounters, it’s a noise that comes to her attention that she has to actively ignore. She’s trained herself to not let it bother her, but humans are food, and it’s her instinct to survive that lets her know when she needs to eat, even if she doesn’t want to. Even after years of trying to ignore it, it’s not something that comes naturally to her.

This is the first woman she hasn’t seen primarily as a food source since she woke up in the hospital all those years ago.

“I feel…” She tries to think of how to describe it, the lack of need that doesn’t sing in her very bones. The hunger that has plagued her, the kind that Stefan has never been able to escape, no longer her primary aim. “I’m not hungry,” she whispers, a hand to her throat in astonishment.

A slow grin spreads over the witch’s painted lips as she over to break the circle. “I’m so glad I could help,” she exclaims, and Caroline rushes over to hug her gratefully.

Hungover but otherwise normal, she can’t help but be thankful for the woman. “I had no idea it was possible,” she whispers, tears springing to her eyes. She hasn’t dared to dream of feeling anything so close to peace in decades. Once, Bonnie had tried looking, but the search never went anywhere, and Caroline hadn’t wanted her to feel guilty when she had to admit there wasn’t anything she could do.

They cling to each other in the hug, and the witch ends it to flip her hair out with a smile that’s almost prideful. “You still have to feed, but now it’s from pleasure like you’d wanted, not pain.”

When Caroline leaves, she practically skips down the street. People are still alluring, but because of their happiness and not their blood, and she’s so grateful that she wants to kiss each and every one of them.

-x-

She goes home and dances in the living room while she’s on the phone with Bonnie and Elena. Elena is thrilled, keeps talking about how maybe this could help others. Bonnie is more hesitant, asks her about what type of price the witch demanded, keeps reminding that magic is not without sacrifice.

“I know that, Bon. She did it out of the goodness of her heart,” Caroline announces, and she opens her fridge to find it packed with blood bags. She can throw them out – she’ll never have any use for them, she realizes gleefully. Less wasteful to give them to a vamp who still needs blood, though, so she decides to call up a friend later to pick them up.

Bonnie scoffs, “Yeah, right,” but she doesn’t protest anymore. If anything, she sounds relieved. “Look, Care, I’m really happy for you. If anything starts to feel weird, call me and I’m flying out there.”

So, okay, they’re all in their sixties and still best friends. Caroline still looks like she belongs more in a high school history class than hanging out with Bonnie and Elena, but she’s always going to be glad to have them on her side.

“I’ll let you know,” she tells her, and they round out the conversation by promising to all meet up for Christmas in a few days. Caroline has volunteered to stuff the turkey since she missed out on Thanksgiving. Holidays are hard without her mom; she chooses to celebrate only one a year.

That taken care of and the blood bags on her mind, she calls up a friend. Paul is a vampire who lives across town and they met while robbing the same blood bank in a meet-cute that Elena dubbed “worthy of a romantic comedy with a horror twist.” They’d gone on a few dates, actually, enough to know that they were better off as just friends. Even if their sexual chemistry was good.

Which reminds her, she’s feeling a little hungry again. She’d sipped a little blood to no avail, as its taste was coppery and bright and completely unsatisfying. But sex is a sort of pleasure, right? So having Paul over might be two things off her checklist for the day.

Hunger is different now. More of a full body experience rather than concentrated in her throat. Her fangs aren’t tempted to drop out either, though she can still let them loose them when she wants to.

The knock on the door comes just in time after she’s finished touching up her makeup, and Caroline slides it open to give Paul a welcoming smile that has a sultry edge to it if he’s looking. She hopes that he’s looking. “Hey there, stranger. Come on in,” she greets him, putting a bit more effort in her hair flip than she might have otherwise.

-x-

“What the fuck is happening?” Paul gasps from her bed, veins pulsing across his body, and Caroline presses herself into her closet door across the room and tries to stop it.

She doesn’t know what she’s doing, she doesn’t know what’s happening or how to stop it. They’d been making out, moved into her bedroom, and things had progressed from there. It had gone well, even better than she remembered them being, to be honest, but that was nothing to complain about.

At least, there hadn’t been anything to complain about until she’d given him a blow job and Paul started acting like she was trying to suck the life out of him.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she shouts, and she’s terrified. She’s so scared it should be the only thing on her mind, but she’s suddenly starving.

It’s a full body feeling like before, but it’s not just an ache or a tingling sensation. Her muscles scream out, and she almost wants to drop her fangs to see if that’ll give her some form of relief. She stops herself, the memory of the taste of blood fresh in her mind from the morning, but she has to do something – she can’t just stand here and hope it gets better.

The witch had said she still needed to feed, just on pleasure.

Paul almost came, and she’d almost fed, but then he hadn’t so now she’s starving. Not to mention crazy horny, way more wound up than it deserves right now, but it’s been a little while. Longer than she’d like to admit.

She’s had things to do, okay? Not to mention, she has standards. Long gone are the days where she needed a man’s attention to feel validated. Now, she’s choosy. Apparently to the point where she builds it up to where she’s having a hard time focusing on how her partner was looking gray a few minutes ago because she hasn’t even made time to masturbate in the last couple of weeks.

Life has gotten busy. She doesn’t really want to talk about it.

Color is coming back into Paul’s face, but slowly. He doesn’t look nearly as bad as he had a few moments ago, so Caroline rushes out and grabs a blood bag for him from the fridge. He takes a few hesitant pulls before drinking enthusiastically.

They both breathe a sigh of relief when his veins retreat fully, and he even laughs a little when he looks in the mirror. “I have no idea what that was, but woah. I was like, starving.”

“Same,” Caroline agrees, relieved to find out that it hadn’t just affected her. “That was so weird. I’m like… Super horny,” she giggles, embarrassed to admit it but willing to once she remembers just how good the sex had been last time. She’ll come forward first if it gets her what she’s after.

Paul chokes on a laugh, but he looks pleased. “Same. I mean, I feel good now. We could…” He gestures to her bed, arching an eyebrow in invitation, which is ridiculous. Caroline would tease him, but she’s too busy taking him up on the offer again.

Slipping underneath him is familiar in all the right ways, gripping his shoulders and wrapping her legs around his hips and sighing exquisitely when he presses inside her. The feeling lights her up in ways that she can’t name, and it’s almost fulfilling. It’s almost enough. Almost.

He doesn’t protest when she flips them, grabbing the headboard and rolling her hips to change the angle, trying to find what’s missing.

“Right there,” she gasps out, and when his nails dig into her hips she gives as good as she gets. Every motion gets her closer, until she’s straddling the threshold, whimpering. Paul’s breathing has changed, but she doesn’t notice, not really, because she needs this in a way that she hadn’t realized. When she’d invited him over, it was for a bit of fun, but this is different than expected. She needs it so badly that she’s almost vibrating with the intensity, and she can’t slow down.

No, she really can’t slow down. It’s not just that she doesn’t want to (even if she doesn’t), it’s that she doesn’t have the necessary control over her body to do anything other than chase what she wants.

Paul groans when he comes, and, oh, yes, right _there_. Caroline grips the headboard so tight that it cracks, and she follows right behind him, chasing her orgasm and screaming when it hits her.

When she pushes herself off him, she’s breathing so hard and her pulse is so loud that it takes a second to hear anything over it. Or, the lack of anything, really. Because she can’t hear Paul’s undead heart. Because his skin is gray and his veins are showing prominently, and everything about him other than the last of a stake in his heart screams that he isn’t coming back. How is this even possible?

There’s a corpse under her, and she doesn’t know what happened. It had almost been like a blackout, only it wasn’t, because she remembers every second of it. She participated in every second of it, but those last few moments she’d been so absorbed in her own pleasure than she hadn’t noticed him as he’d apparently died.

Oh, no. She fucked him to death. She thought that was barely possible for humans – surely, vampires were safe from recreationally induced heart attacks?

-x-

Caroline goes back to Mystic Falls. After she burns his corpse, after she cleans her apartment with every cleaning product she has plus two buckets of bleach from the corner store.

Oh, God, she’d walked to the corner bodega and bought two gallons of bleach, rubber gloves, a new pack of sponges, air freshener, and a pack of cigarettes. The teenage cashier had eyed her warily while totaling up her purchase, and he hadn’t even attempted to hit on her like he had during her previous visits. She’s going to have to find a new store to grab midnight chocolate snacks from.

She’d burned her cute hookup’s corpse – after waiting a couple of days to make sure that he wasn’t just going to wake back up from death as per usual. She does her due vampire diligence, of course, even though she’d never seen any vampire come back from that particular look of undead pallor.

After all of that, she’d hopped on the first flight out to Richmond and texted Bonnie to let her know.

Nothing that would make her worry.

_So I fucked my vampire FWB to death-death and I don’t know how it happened. On the bright side, I’m not hungry anymore? Also I picked up smoking. On my way, see you soon!_

That first draft had been deleted and re-written enough time to resemble something normal that would convey not even a shred of evidence. Something totally normal that a friend would send before coming for an impromptu visit. Something that wouldn’t even set off Bonnie’s alarms.

_Coming to see you ahead of schedule! Missed you guys!_

No mention of death, vampires, or hunger. Just a simple heads-up and a selfie of her at the airport.

Nevertheless, when she lands in Richmond, Bonnie is waiting at baggage claim, and Caroline tucks herself into her arms without a second thought.

“I was worried,” Bonnie admits, because she’s all-knowing.

Caroline smiles and tries to distract herself from it. “I specifically didn’t want you to worry,” she chides the other woman, who looks significantly older. Bonnie’s hair is streaked with gray and wrinkles lines her forehead and eyes, and Caroline doesn’t know that she’ll ever get used to the fact that time leaves her unchanged while laying claim to her friends. She guesses that she’ll get used to it, eventually.

Pushing the thought from her mind, they climb into her car and sing the songs that they used to play at high school dances, and she’s missed her so much more than she’d been willing to admit. She has friends in New York, but no one like Bonnie or Elena.

Bonnie is such a good friend that she doesn’t push for details, and even then it isn’t necessarily intentional. (Caroline has her suspicions, but she decides that accusations will get her nowhere.) When they get inside, Bonnie motions to the fridge and says, “I can get you a blood bag if you need it.”

That won’t help, and she’s not hungry anyway. She hasn’t been hungry since she came down from having an orgasm over Paul’s dead body, and she keeps coming back to the words that the witch told her, about how she’d feed on pleasure and not pain.

Caroline lifts up the bunch of sage that Bonnie keeps by the door just in case and motions for Bonnie to light it. Not that Mystic Falls has been a hellmouth for a while, but it’s better safe than sorry.

The whole story comes out before she can really think it through, and she’s crying on Bonnie’s couch like she’s still the teenager that she looks like. Because she’s a freak, some kind of monster. A new kind of monster, because she’d actually gotten pretty used to being a normal vampire. She’d been good at it – better than she’d ever been at being human, but she’d turned her nose up at blood and then she’d gone and tattled to a witch that she didn’t know, and now she can apparently kill the men she has sex with.

“I killed a vampire, Bonnie!” she screams, and she must look deranged. Hair flying everywhere, half fallen out of the bun she’d put it up in on the plane, waving her arms for something to do with her hands. “No stake in the heart, heart still in his chest. He died! Like, he really died! Or, he didn’t come back undead.”

Fidgeting, she reaches into her purse and lifts out the pack of cigarettes she’d bought at home.

Bonnie frowns at her pointedly, and Caroline snaps, defensive, “It’s not like I can get cancer.”

Wisely, Bonnie doesn’t mention the town’s former sheriff, but Caroline puts them back into her purse without lighting one anyway. It’s rude to smoke in someone’s home (even if they do light sage regularly) without their permission.

Folding her hands on the table and projecting and air of calm that Caroline has always been jealous of, Bonnie starts by saying, “Let’s figure this out.”

-x-

Because her life is a prank show with God as the host, Bonnie suggests that they test out whether it was just a fluke or not. Her brilliant plan is for Caroline to try this out with by having sex with Stefan. Stefan Salvatore, her ex-boyfriend.

Their relationship had ended when she’d thrown an engagement ring at his face and screamed something hurtful within the realm of “sorry I don’t look like a doppelganger” before getting on a flight to Europe and drinking enough sangria to tranquilize a horse. Maybe enough to tranquilize a vampire horse.

So not the best end to what hadn’t been the healthiest relationship, but things between them have gotten progressively less awkward over the years. Everyone has adapted to the new normal. Last year, Stefan had even told her that she made great cranberry sauce. Elena had beamed, more excited than when he’d actually proposed marriage, but, you know. Baby steps all around. Caroline had accepted the compliment with grace and poise, and she’d even had a second helping of the rolls he’d brought.

All of that to say that they’re only barely on speaking terms. There’s nowhere near the level of comfort that would be required to have sex.

“Stefan?” Caroline almost chokes on the word, because surely Bonnie can’t be serious.

“You said that Paul had only been turned a couple of years ago. He was a baby vampire. Stefan is older and more durable. Let’s start from there,” she says, as though that’s a reasonable plan of action.

Okay, so that’s slightly more well thought out than Caroline was originally willing to give her credit for, but it’s still a terrible idea. “I’m not even hungry. Let’s not resort to desperate plays unless we actually need them,” she hisses out, even though it’s not like she has any better ideas.

-x-

Only days later, she’s clinging to hope that Bonnie is going to figure something out. Stefan has thankfully been kept out of the loop of his status as an emergency food source, and all he knows is that she’s just in town for the holidays.

“Gotta perfect the stuffing recipe,” Caroline claims, shoving a loaded fork at him when he visits.

His eyebrows furrow, but he eats it willingly anyway. “Maybe a little too much sage,” he says at last.

They’ve been burning so much that Caroline has tried to make good use of the leaves anyway, but she’ll admit to maybe being a bit heavy handed about it.

She notes the complaint and thinks about how the next batch will have a balsamic glaze and not about how getting back into bed with him might not be the worst thing ever. He is, as ever, really fucking cute.

She blinks and tears her eyes away from how his shirtsleeves have been rolled up past his elbows and it only emphasizes his biceps. She’s been in Mystic Falls for a few days now, and she’s hungrier than she’s willing to admit. And hornier, too, but it’s kind of a merged experience where the feelings fuse together so thoroughly that she can’t quite pick out which is which.

After he leaves, Caroline pokes her head into Bonnie’s office (it looks totally normal, only it’s grimoires and not old copies of Austen novels on the shelves) to see her pouring over yet another spell in an attempt to figure out what’s wrong with her.

“Any progress?” she asks, hope making itself known even though she knows Bonnie would have told her about any leads.

With a sigh, Bonnie looks up and bites her lip. “We need to think more about the backup plan.”

Great. Another day of dead ends.

The thing is, there has to be a better backup plan than her ex-boyfriend who has only recently been able to stand in the same room with her without sending her admittedly cute puppy dog eyes. People have sex all the time, or at least with some sense of regularity. Until recently, Caroline was among those people, and sex didn’t have to mean much other than a fun night to ease some tension. Now, it isn’t just a good time – it’s apparently dangerous. Not that she’s working off a huge sample size here.

Which is one of the things that Bonnie keeps coming back to, and the conversation winds its way there again once more. Because she seemingly wants to put more people in danger.

“You don’t know that you killed Paul,” she starts, ignoring the look that Caroline gives her. “Or, you don’t know that Paul died when he came. What if it happened when you came?”

“I was just too much woman for him to handle,” Caroline retorts, dry as ever. She killed a guy by riding him to death, a memory that will be seared into her brain for pretty much ever. She doesn’t exactly want to get into a play by play of the scene that lives in her nightmares.

Bonnie holds up her hands and clarifies, “That’s not what I’m trying to say. Hear me out. You said that earlier in the night, he got kind of gray but got over it with a blood bag. What if he came and you fed from him, but he just couldn’t survive it when you came?”

That is… Not the worst thought they’ve had when going over this. Caroline still has a problem with this one, though.

“I couldn’t stop myself,” she admits at last, keeping her eyes on the floor. “Once it got to that point, I honestly don’t think I had any control. I hear what you’re saying, but I still don’t think it’s safe. Even with a stronger subject.” She says subject like it’s a bad word, because they’re talking about people’s lives. At least she knew how to drink from a human and leave them alive. Her control when it came to bloodlust was honestly impeccable; she’d been told so more than once.

She feels like a baby vampire all over again. Not that her sixties is old, exactly, especially when only a little more than forty of those years were spent feeding on humans, but she used to be good at this stuff. Now, she’s starting from the beginning all because she’d felt like complaining about her food.

They sit in silence for a while as Bonnie thinks things over.

Caroline is just about to call it a night and head up to the guest bedroom she’s been saying in when Bonnie suggest timidly, “You could try watching other people have sex. That way they might not directly be in danger.”

-x-

Mystic Falls has exactly one strip club, on the very edge of town, and Caroline honestly can’t believe this is her life. She fled New York City, a hotbed of strippers, sex, and wanton desire. Only to come back to a small town in Virginia where there’s so little sexual energy that she might starve.

Hopefully she won’t starve. They can’t decide on a backup plan, and if Bonnie pushes the Stefan option one more time, Caroline is going to start suspecting that she has ulterior motives.

The place is old, like super old. The last renovation was probably done while Caroline was still human. The clientele don’t look much younger, she realizes when she looks around. All of the older men with receding hairlines and growing paunches over the equator of their belt are so predictable that it’s almost amusing, at least until she remembers why she’s here. Watching one of them have sex is the last thing that she wants to be doing, but she’s hungry.

The bartender eyes her uncomfortably when she orders a cocktail, but he doesn’t ID her, and she thinks he’s the kind of guy she would have picked up only a few months ago. Out of boredom, not necessarily out of hunger. Okay, so there’s a chance that she might have had a snack and then compelled him to forget before sending him home for the night, but a girl’s got to eat.

A girl’s got to eat. She keeps that in the forefront of her mind as she takes a seat near the platform that’s being used as a stage.

All in all, it’s a small town strip club. She doesn’t know what else she should have expected. The music is nothing memorable, the floor is sticky with spilled alcohol and things she doesn’t want to think more about, and it smells like they’ve been pumping Axe body spray into the air conditioning unit.

She’s kind of pissed that it works.

-x-

“Well?” Bonnie asks when she comes through the door, curled up in an armchair by the fireplace. She puts down her book when Caroline flops down onto the couch across from her. “Oh, come on, it couldn’t have been that bad.”

With a groan, Caroline lifts her head to glare at her. “It was fine.” She’d almost have preferred it being awful, but that’s apparently not how her life works now.

Because instead of being disgusted when the guy a few seats away from her started not-so-discreetly trying to give himself some action through his pants during one of the racier routines, Caroline had felt almost relieved. His actions soothed some of the hunger that had worked its way into her bones, the ache receding incrementally more with each of the sighs that he failed to silence. When he’d eventually gotten himself off to the sight of a college drop out shimmying to a hit that hadn’t been on the charts in years, she felt the energy transfer to her, filling enough to where her senses weren’t heightened from hunger in a way that she hadn’t realized.

Okay, so feeding off pleasure might be more achievable than she’d first anticipated.

“Fine?” Bonnie presses, never satisfied without all the details.

Caroline pulls herself off the couch and frowns. “I think I fed on a middle-aged dad trapped in an unhappy marriage getting himself off to a girl who’s probably only a few years older than his daughter. I feel gross.” She’s already dreaming about taking a shower with scalding hot water and exfoliating enough of her skin off that she won’t feel like the backs of her thighs are still stuck to the faux-leather upholstery of the chairs.

A shudder runs through Bonnie, but she checks in just to be safe. “You aren’t hungry anymore, though?”

She’s not full, but she’s not hungry. It’s like she had a snack after not eating for a week. The edge has been taken off, but she doesn’t know how long that’ll last. “I’m not going to dry hump the next person who walks in here,” Caroline tells her decisively. She hadn’t realized how bad it was before.

Bonnie gives a fist pump and picks up her book again. “I’m just glad we’ll be able to have a mostly normal holiday. Also, that we don’t have to worry about Stefan potentially sacrificing himself to your bed just because he wants to feel wanted.”

He needs a girlfriend; it’s true.

A couple of years have gone by since she’s bothered to feel guilty about their breakup, and she still doesn’t feel great about it, but she figured that breaking his heart was the better alternative compared with confining herself to living out her eternity in a life she didn’t want. Eventually, she thinks he’ll come to understand that it was for the best.

Caroline heads for the stairs, still intent on her shower, stopping only at the top when she thinks about the clothes she’s wearing. “Does your washer have a sanitize cycle?”

If not, it’s not like this is her favorite dress. She’d be okay with burning it.

-x-

The holidays are good, if weird. Damon and Elena’s kids have never been super comfortable around vampires, and that hasn’t changed now that they look physically older than their uncle. They make sweet potato casserole, homemade macaroni and cheese, and all the usual holiday goodies, and everyone makes the appropriate humming noise when they take their first bite of Caroline’s now-perfected stuffing recipe.

She went through five trial runs before getting it just right. She’d rather earn her compliments than compel them.

Everyone asks about her life in New York, and she talks about doing a modeling gig just for the hell of it and doesn’t tell them that she has a new food source. When Damon pours some blood into her wine glass, he’s doing it out of the goodness of his heart, and she keeps quiet.

She’s hungry even after the meal, even after she’s had seconds, despite feeding only a few nights ago. Claiming a headache would get her out of the usual after-dinner games and let her leave early enough to make it down to the strip club so that she can really feed. Or snack, as the case may be.

Honestly, planning to go to a strip club after Christmas dinner? The only people with plans lamer than hers are the guys who will be watching girls in cheaply made red lingerie with white faux-fur trim sway their hips to a botched rendition of Santa Baby.

Tackiness just party of the holiday, she guesses, drinking her blood and trying to keep from projectile vomiting across the table. She honestly can’t believe that she used to enjoy this stuff. It’s sour and thick and coats her throat in a way that’s reminiscent of dairy in all the worst ways. The only thing she’s ever had worse than it is the eggnog cocktail that Stefan spiked one year with O-negative.

-x-

Even when she should be ready to go back to New York, she’s terrified of returning. She needs to buy new sheets. Paul died on her only set.

So she sticks around through New Years, and even after that she doesn’t pack her bags or make any attempt to vacate Bonnie’s guest room. Bonnie is a gracious host about it all, continuing to attempt to look for a cure. There isn’t as much urgency to the search now that they have a fix for it, but Caroline really hopes she doesn’t have to live out the rest of her life sneaking around strip clubs and hoping that she gets the type of neighbors who have sex at all hours.

She tries to make herself useful anyway, to take care of housework and stay on Bonnie’s good side to avoid getting kicked out. Her helpfulness has also enabled Bonnie to dedicate more time perusing her witchy sources in search of anything that can give them more information.

“I think I’ve got something,” Bonnie calls one day from her office. “It doesn’t really have an explanation or a solution, but there’s information.”

After putting away the last of the dishes from dinner, Caroline goes into the office and plucks the book out of Bonnie’s lap. “Well, tell me what this is supposed to do anyway,” she suggests while pulling out a chair, because the Latin words and symbols don’t make any sense unless Bonnie is willing to walk her through them step by step.

Obliging her, Bonnie flips a few pages back and points to a pentagram and a few unrecognizable symbols next to it. “This is the closest thing I’ve been able to find, but it’s still probably not you. Or, not totally. It’s about demons who feed off sexual energy, but it doesn’t seem quite right.”

Caroline is already searching ‘sex demons’ on her phone when Bonnie waves her off, continuing her explanation, “The male form is called an incubus, and the female form is known as a succubus. They only appear in dreams, though; they aren’t beings who can walk in the waking world.” She moves her finger down the page to a portion that was underlined twice. “When they feed, it can drain their source of life and not just sexual energy.”

So not helpful considering that they already knew what the result of Caroline’s first feeding was, but at least there’s a name for this kind of thing. Well, kind of.

“So, I’m an incubus?” Caroline asks before remembering the distinction. “A succubus, fine, whatever. I need sex to survive. We knew that.”

She’s always thought of herself as a pretty liberated woman, but she’s never needed sex. There have been plenty of times that she’s gone without. Longer stretches of time than she’d be willing to admit, but life gets busy and she has projects to work on. She’s a liberated enough woman to not need sex.

Or, at least, she hadn’t until that witch had swapped out the very thing that she needs to survive.

Bonnie purses her lips and shakes her head slowly, considering her words. “You’re still a vampire. The speed, the compulsion, that’s all still there. You still have all the weaknesses of a vampire, too, but you’ve definitely got the feeding thing going on for these things. It’s like she made you into some sort of hybrid.”

Hybrid. The word sends a chill down her spine, and Caroline puts a hand on the edge of the desk to steady herself. Bonnie’s next words only make the stone in her stomach sink further.

“If you’re going to feed directly, it needs to be from a strong source. Not just any vampire, although they’re more likely to survive than humans. You could kill a human without trying if you fed straight from them and not just secondhand like you’ve been doing.” She flips a couple more pages and sighs.

A strong source is needed for her to feed directly.

She’s known for the past couple weeks that she’s just been surviving, not thriving. That’s why they’ve kept looking for answers even with this middling solution in place. It works for now, but it’s not the kind of thing that can sustain her for long. She has to feed almost every day, whereas it had taken almost several for it to get bad again after she’d fed the first time.

She doesn’t know that she’s willing to go to a route that extreme yet, but it’s a better backup plan than Stefan had ever been.

-x-

A month later, she feels like she’s going crazy. She’s having to feed every night, and it still isn’t enough. She’s so hungry that Bonnie has told her she can’t be in Caroline’s sightline without feeling sexually frustrated, and she leaves a vibrator and a bottle of lube on her guest’s bed in a super weird attempt at hospitality.

Masturbating doesn’t help. If anything, it makes it worse. It’s like chewing gum, like she’s tricking her stomach into thinking it’s feeding, and she’s even hungrier when it’s over.

“This isn’t working,” Bonnie tells her. Over the phone, because she isn’t even willing to be on the same floor as Caroline now. “You need to do something, like actually feed.”

As loathe to agree as she is, Caroline knows that she’s right. Hunger is making its home in her, and if she doesn’t take action now, she’ll find herself doing something that she won’t be able to control. “I have an idea, but you won’t like it,” she says, wary to say more.

“Like I said before, Stefan would help,” Bonnie tries to reassure her. Not what she was going for.

With a roll of her eyes, Caroline kicks up her feet onto the bed and tries to think of the most diplomatic way to convey the message she wants to get across. “Please stop trying to get us back together; I’m so over him that it’s not even funny.” She’s only putting off what she actually wants to say, but maybe she shouldn’t tell Bonnie about it now. She doesn’t even know if he’d go for it.

Even as she thinks it, she knows she’s wrong. They haven’t seen each other in years, not since she ran into him at a bar, but she still remembers how he’d kissed her cheek before dropping her off at her apartment.

Nothing more had happened, and she’d been grateful for it then. Now, she thinks having a more recent memory than the forest all those years ago would help her find some relief. Not that that’s a particularly bad memory, just that she needs something more. He’d help if she asked. All she has to do is ask.

“Well, what do you think would work then?” Bonnie asks.

Clenching her thighs together at the thought, Caroline admits, “I’m going to call Klaus.”

The silence across the line speaks for itself. She knew that Bonnie wouldn’t be thrilled at the mention of his name, but she’s hoping that the witch will be able to see the sense in it.

Klaus is an Original vampire, not to mention the extra strength that his wolf side gives him, and their sexual chemistry was off the charts even before she got partially turned into a sex demon who needs orgasms to live. He’d survive, even if she fed directly from him, and the hunger clawing at her stomach and cunt makes her think she doesn’t have much time before that’s the only option she’ll be left with.

Bonnie sighs, but she doesn’t protest. That’s how bad this is – Bonnie is willing to entertain the thought that Klaus, who she probably believes is the most evil person in the world, could be the solution.

“Are you sure?” she asks at last.

Even if Caroline hadn’t totally made up her mind when she’d brought it up, this seals the deal. She can stop by the strip club later to get a snack that’ll hopefully last long enough to let her get to New Orleans without sexually assaulting anyone on the road. All that she has to do is let him know she’s coming.

“Absolutely,” Caroline says, injecting confidence into her voice that she isn’t sure she actually feels.


	2. Tell Me What You Need

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You said you were hungry,” Klaus says through a clenched jaw.
> 
> So much so that she’s dizzy with it. “I am,” Caroline tells him, swaying towards the heat of his body before she’s conscious of the movement.
> 
> He digs blunt, human nails into her skin and pulls her closer, hissing as he does so, “You’re starving, love.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [destellolunar](https://destellolunar.tumblr.com/) made the most amazing banner for the story that I just posted at the beginning, so this chapter is totally dedicated to her!

In the morning, she throws a bag into her rental car (score for contactless pickup – she doesn’t trust her control enough right now to be around humans) and waves to Bonnie, who’s watching her through the window with a pinched expression.

Only fourteen hours to New Orleans. She can do this.

She hypes herself up during the first hour. When she first became a vampire, Stefan told her all the time about how great her control was, and she only got better at it. Surely, this is kind of the same thing, right? She just has to remind herself that these are people, not just the source of orgasms that won’t even be able to satisfy her.

Well, she thinks there would be a certain amount of satisfaction from feeding straight from the source. After Paul, it had taken almost a week before she noticed the hunger. So it stands to reason that she might be able to make it longer if she was willing to take more. The problem comes into play when she considers that she has no idea how to control what she’s taking until she’s taken too much. So she just has to learn how to feed again, only a little differently this time.

By the time that she’s worked herself up enough to where she’s ready to call Klaus, she’s more than halfway into the drive. Part of her wants to rely on the element of surprise. He’d be too stunned by her arrival to think about turning her down, which could only work to her advantage.

Klaus deserves the option to consider it, though, to think about what he’s getting himself into. She killed someone, and she has no idea the type of power drainage that she’s capable of. Paul was a vampire, albeit a young one. She’d probably kill a human without even trying, but she doesn’t want to think about it. There is a power in her that didn’t used to be there, a power that she has no idea how to control. He has to be aware of the danger that she represents.

The call doesn’t go to voicemail, dashing the hope that she’d be able to continue her drive without actually hearing his voice. She knows he’ll help; she just doesn’t want to risk him saying no.

“Well, this is quite the surprise, love,” he greets her, his voice low and throaty. The fact that it’s enough to make her thighs clench should be illegal.

Tightening her grip on the steering wheel, she responds, trying to keep her voice casual, “Just thought I’d let you know I’m headed to your neck of the woods.”

He hums, and she knows already that he’s suspicious. She doesn’t just head over to his ‘neck of the woods’ without reason, and why is she now the type of person who says things like ‘neck of the woods’? That sounds so lame, of course he knows that something’s up. She’s awful about sounding normal when things aren’t. They aren’t the kind of friends who talk often.

They aren’t really friends, is the thing.

They’ve had drinks twice since she asked him to leave Mystic Falls (well, drink might be more appropriate – she’s never had more than one around him, too aware of what her lowered inhibitions could lead to), and she’s never even been in the state of Louisiana, much less thought about entering the kingdom within it that he’s carved for himself.

“What’s the occasion?” There’s an edge to his words that hadn’t been there before, a thread of worry that she hopes she isn’t just imagining.

She takes a moment to repeat what’s become her hype mantra over the last hundred miles. 

_You are a hot, independent, sexually liberated woman. You are the stuff of wet dreams and fantasies. He should be so lucky that you’d choose him, of all people, to help with this._

“I need your help,” she admits at last.

Immediately, he asks, “What happened?” Because of course he isn’t going to let her off the hook easily.

This time, she definitely isn’t imagining the worry. “Everything’s fine; I’m okay.” She doesn’t know how much longer she’ll be okay; she’d purposefully chosen a station off the highway that looked practically abandoned when she’s stopped for gas last. She hadn’t trusted herself with anything more.

“Caroline,” Klaus bites out, “tell me what happened.”

One of the nice things about doing this over the phone and not through person is that she can take her time. If she was actually in front of him right now, she thinks he’d have already freaked out. As it is, he’s barely tolerating the fact that she hasn’t already spilled her every secret. “Basically, I got myself into a spell a while ago that is having unforeseen repercussions.”

“I’ll call my sister; she can be here within the hour to assist.” He volunteers the information freely, as though it isn’t something that he would only do for someone he cares for.

She decides to ignore the part of her that wants to pry more into that, to discover what else he would do with only the barest indication that she needs something from him. “I don’t need a witch, at least not right now. Bonnie has been working at this for a while with no real leads, and all she’s been able to do is come up with a name for it.”

Klaus asks the only reasonable question that can follow up a statement such as that, and she still cringes. “What is it called?”

_He should be so lucky that you’d choose him._

Caroline bites the bullet. “Have you heard of succubi?”

For once, he’s quiet when all she wants to hear are his reassurances. She’s about to ask if he’s still there, check to see if the line went bad, when he says, “I’ve heard rumors here and there throughout the years, but nothing concrete. Are you saying you’ve been drained by one?”

That would be easy to solve. She’d have drunk a couple of blood bags and taken things easy for the next few days. No, what she’s dealing with is a bit more complicated. “I think I am one,” she tells him.

This time, her worry gets the better of her, and she explains before he can ask anything more, “I told this witch that I didn’t want to survive on pain anymore, so she said she could make it so I lived off pleasure instead. Which admittedly sounded great at the time, but I didn’t ask any follow up questions or even sleep on it, just agreed, so she turned me into some sort of succubus-vampire hybrid. I mean, I’m still the same, still me. I just have a different food source now.”

“What can I help you with?” he asks at last, because he’s many things, but he isn’t presumptuous when it comes to her. Not anymore.

The answer tears itself from her throat before she can stop it. “I’m hungry,” she whispers, ashamed.

There’s five more hours on the road, and she’s going to make it. She’s determined to make it without hurting anyone, but she honestly thinks about turning back when he pauses.

“I’ll be here for whatever you need,” Klaus answers, calm and steady and everything she could have hoped for.

-x-

She’s almost lightheaded with arousal by the time she makes it into the Abattoir in New Orleans. The last hour had been a test of her strength, and she’d nearly veered off the road more than once, lost in thought about how good it would feel to actually feed after so long of subsisting of such a sparse diet. Part of her had been tempted to pick up a snack when she’d seen billboards advertise massage parlors that implied more than one type of happy ending.

The only thing able to keep her going was the knowledge that Klaus was waiting for her at the end of the journey. The promise of his touch was enough to break through the haze of desire that clouds her mind, and Caroline doesn’t care about being seen as desperate anymore. She cares about the gnawing emptiness that makes itself known throughout her body, and she’d give almost anything for blood.

Blood won’t help, though, and she knows it. There’s only one thing that she needs, and there’s only one person who could hope to survive her.

She hasn’t even made it into the courtyard before Klaus is standing before her, a hand on her neck as he takes her in. His eyes are threaded with gold, and she’d nearly forgotten how beautiful he is.

“You said you were hungry,” he says through a clenched jaw.

So much so that she’s dizzy with it. “I am,” she tells him, swaying towards the heat of his body before she’s conscious of the movement.

His fingers are nearly claws, and she’s torn between leaning back into them or whether she should press herself more completely against the hard muscles of his chest. Either way, she needs to be touched. He saves her from having to make the decision when he digs blunt, human nails into her skin and pulls her closer, hissing as he does so, “You’re starving, love.”

So maybe she’s hungrier than she might have let on over the phone, but she had thought at the time that saying something like “I want to devour you” would’ve been more forward than she was comfortable with. Even if it was the truth.

Hasn’t it always been the truth? Isn’t that what she’s been afraid of?

“I managed.” The words come out as a whimper. The need that she had pushed off during the drive has come back with a vengeance, overpowering and all consuming. She kisses him before she can think that she shouldn’t, that they should at least talk this through or lay out some ground rules. This isn’t a normal hookup or anything like it, and they don’t have enough history here for it to be assumed that she’d have come to him with this.

His mouth opens beautifully under hers, giving her the control that Caroline hadn’t even realized she craved. She licks into him enthusiastically, gratified at the moan he lets out when he presses her against the wall and uses the leverage to lift her up. 

The friction between them only makes her want more, and she wraps her legs around him eagerly, moans muffled by his mouth when she feels the hard line of his clothed cock against her overheated core. Grinding into the feeling only gives her so much relief, because they both know this isn’t actually going to sustain her, and she’s half-mad with deprivation.

She breaks the kiss to figure her next move, and it’s only then that she realizes that he’s managed to get them upstairs and into a bedroom without her noticing. 

“What do you need?” He reaches between them as he asks it, getting the button of his pants undone, and Caroline shudders when his thumb slips under her skirt and against the lace of her underwear.

The question is so big that she can’t begin to think about answering it, can barely think straight in the first place. All she knows is that her bones sing with longing, and Klaus has an energy coming off him that’s so addicting that the only word that comes to mind is – “More,” she moans, and he delivers beautifully.

His thumb pushes the lace aside, and he sinks two fingers into her without hesitation. Her body welcomes the intrusion, and she scratches at his shirt, ripping through the fabric until there’s more of it on the floor than on his skin. He captures her mouth once more with a ferocity that’s almost violent, and it’s so, so good. It’s better than she’s felt in weeks, but it still isn’t anywhere close to enough. 

When he slips his fingers out of her to grab at his zipper, she manages to not cry at the feeling of emptiness that plagues her. Focusing on the end goal, she hooks her fingers through Klaus’s beltloops to drag him forwards and drops onto the bed. 

His duvet cover is made of silk with a high enough thread count that it would embarrass her cotton sheets back home, but the texture is rough against her skin and it feels like she’s being boiled alive from the inside out. New Orleans has a warm climate, but it’s still winter, and everyone she saw on her drive into the city was wearing a coat. Caroline thinks that if she doesn’t get her clothes off immediately she’s going to burn apart, fizzle out until only ash is left behind.

She lets go of Klaus’s pants, leaving him to take care of them himself, putting her attention instead to slipping out of the skirt she’s wearing. It’s a cotton blend, but it might as well be wool. Every stitch of fabric that rubs against her is too much. 

Packing for the trip, she’d set aside lingerie and worn a matching black lace set on the drive down. At the time, it had seemed a tad presumptuous but not enough for her to feel embarrassed about. She won’t be able to stand the tease of lingerie, the slow strip of each piece of clothing. The very idea of having to wait is maddening, drives her ever closer to insanity.

She needs him. Now, hours ago, months ago. Caroline has been waiting for this for so long that it feels impossible, hunger warping the desire that she’s always had for him.

Seams rips when she pulls off her shirt, but it’s so worth it to be naked and waiting for him, and she grins victoriously to find him in much the same way, readying himself. Every pump of his hand feels like a release of her own making, soothing the arousal that had made her almost rabid with want. She shivers with anticipation and scoots up the mattress until she feels a pillow under her head.

“Are you sure, love?” Klaus asks, and there isn’t a hint of blue left in his irises. 

It’s sweet of him to ask, but she genuinely doesn’t know if she has any other option, even if she wasn’t certain. Taking a breath in an attempt to calm herself, she tries to keep her voice steady. “I want you,” Caroline affirms, before realizing that maybe it’s her who should ask him that question. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to control myself. Once we start,” she clarifies. The truth of the matter is that she doesn’t know if she’d be able to leave now, thinks that tearing herself away from him and his scorching touch might prove to be too much. She’d try, though, if she had to. “Are _you_ sure about this?”

He crawls onto the bed and hovers over her, pressing a kiss to her lips that’s almost too sweet for the circumstances they’ve found themselves in. “I can more than handle it; I assure you,” he tells her, and she thinks she’d trust him with this no matter what.

Romantic notions aside, the emptiness inside her is begging to be filled, and Caroline thinks she might cry with anguish if he doesn’t do _something_.

She fists her hands into the duvet as he presses inside her, and the stretch to accommodate him is more fulfilling than she could have dreamed of. Her spine lights up with the aching tenderness that he puts into the action. Her eyes flutter shut of their own accord, and she fights to keep them open, committed to watching the shifting expressions that battle his way across his face. Pleasure and desire war with some unnamed intensity that wins out when he pulls out with a roll of his hips and then snaps back at an even faster rate. 

His abdominals ripple with the effort that he puts into the action. Klaus is pure strength, and she’s nearly animalistic underneath him, writhing and undulating with each movement. There is no tenderness, only need, and he gives her everything that she asks for.

“Yes, yes,” she chants lowly, arching her back and going nearly wild when he turns his head to suck one of her nipples into his mouth, tongue and teeth moving over the point of flesh.

Every action sends her spiraling, and Caroline is almost unaware of her own self except for how he’s the only thing she can concentrate on. Her body and mind are made entirely of conflicting interests, and she settles for reaching between them to swipe her thumb across her clit. 

The months of denial and restraint have boiled down to only this moment, only the physical touch of his skin against hers, making a meal of his lust. She is a creature incapable of anything except desire, reduced only to a woman frenzied, resolute to give into her longings. 

She wants everything that he offers her and more.

Klaus, as it seems, is determined to give it to her, swatting her hand away and replacing it with his. She drags it up his back instead, not bothering to be gentle about it when she scratches him up with her nails. “Caroline,” he groans, dropping his forehead to her collarbone and sucking harshly at the skin then, intent on leaving a mark in spite of how her body will heal it to hide from the world.

She wraps her legs around him tightly and lets herself focus on her body, how the arousal that had wound itself so tightly around her has started to fray. In a way, she’s only more desperate now that release is so near, knows that it won’t get better until he comes apart inside her. He was right when he first saw her; she’s starving.

Her moans get lost in his kiss, and she settles for licking the seam of his lips open. 

Every motion brings them closer together, and Caroline thinks that she can feel him in her bones, almost like a second pulse. She’s hovering on the edge, so fucking close that it feels like she’s being split apart, and Klaus must know, mutters into her skin, “Take what you need.”

If she wasn’t so frantic, if she was in her right mind, she thinks that she’d deny him. As it is, she wants it in a way that she’s never known before, too much to be concerned with the possible repercussions of losing control. She flips them and adjusts to get the perfect angle, arching her back when he puts an arm around her waist to anchor her. 

With each press of their hips, she sees stars in the corner of her vision. Leaning back gets her closer to how she wants it, but even her hands on his thighs can’t ground her, and she goes for it with abandon when his mouth falls open in a wordless cry.

Klaus gasps and comes with her name on his lips, but she can’t hear him over the rush of energy that he releases when he does so. It’s magnificent, filling and almost sweet in a way that she’d never noticed before. She tips over the edge at last, finding her pleasure as she devours it, so heady with the ecstasy wracking through her body that she nearly blacks out.

-x-

Caroline wakes up with fingers carded through her hair, massaging her scalp, and she presses into it before she can think better of the action. A soft moan slides out from her lips, and Klaus chuckles humorlessly before repeating the motion.

“You’re still hungry,” he tells her, and she can’t bother to deny it.

Her bones no longer ache with emptiness, but she doesn’t yet feel full. Feeding from Klaus had been such a relief, and it took more than just the edge off, but she’s been subsisting on less than that for so long that it clearly wasn’t enough. She shudders slightly, because she has no idea how to manage this new diet. Everything about it, from what she can eat to how long it can sustain her, is a complete mystery.

“How long have we been asleep?” New Orleans had been lit by street lamps when she’d arrived, but there’s natural light starting to come in through the windows, lingering on the floorboards as the sun finds its grip on the horizon line.

Klaus rolls slightly to the nightstand and pauses a moment before announcing, “Almost five hours.” He cups her hip when he comes back, covered only by the sheet, and she wishes that he’d push it to the wayside so that they could be skin to skin, longs for that contact.

As if he could read her mind, he slips his hand under the sheet to brush against her shoulder and then breast as it travels back to its original place, and she sighs with the sensation. When his thumb strokes against the area absentmindedly, she leans her head back to meet his gaze.

It feels strange to have found themselves here, so suddenly. 

“Thank you,” she whispers, placing a kiss on the only part of his neck that she can reach.

She expects him to ask what that was for, but he looks at her with blue eyes and answers, “I would do anything for you.”

That’s what she’s afraid of, but it doesn’t bear saying. When considering the grand scheme of his life, they have spent so little time together, and yet he trusts her with pieces of himself that she’s terrified to handle. She does not handle her own heart carefully; how can she be entrusted with his? It’s that very trust that enables her to take care of it, though, unwilling to prove him wrong.

Caroline bites her lip, unsure of what sort of response a statement as sweeping and grand as that requires, relieved when he dips his hand lower. Her answering sigh and the part of her legs to make room between her thighs tells him all that he needs to know. 

The previous night had been fast and frantic; she’d been too starved to have managed anything else. The hunger still lingers within her, but less needy, more ready to wait, and Klaus seems all too willing to take his time.

His fingers learn the intricacies of her folds, slipping along each tender place, and he exploits every noise that falls from her lips. The morning light feels tender and leaves her more exposed than she thinks she should feel after what they did last night.

Then, she felt no shame, knew only the sound of skin on skin, knew only that she needed him in a way that twisted her desire into something raw and new. She’s come back to herself, no longer insatiable, inhabiting her body instead of fighting against it. Her hands tremble when she thinks about the previous night, how Klaus had trusted her implicitly, even with a new monster under her skin, even knowing that she wouldn’t have any modicum of control.

His movements are so slow that they must be meant to torture, but he doesn’t speed up even when Caroline whispers, “Please.” The only indication that he’s heard is when he obligingly slips a finger inside her, and her muscles clamp down so as to prevent it from leaving.

“I’m going to give you what you need, love,” he tells her, voice still sleep-rough and heavy with intent, but he pulls it out anyway. Her wordless protest is met with a harsh press of his thumb to her clit.

Impatient, she shifts onto her side, rubbing her ass against his cock to feel it harden. “Not fast enough,” she complains, because the alternative is to lay back and fall apart in his arms. The problem is that path is too easy, and she thinks that the push and pull of them should be harder to adjust to. 

He chuckles lowly, and her cunt clenches around nothing, the emptiness almost swallowing her whole. Caroline feels unsteady at the sound, thinking that he shouldn’t be allowed to drive such visceral responses out of her unintentionally. “What’s the matter, love – afraid of a little temptation?”

Her stomach flips, core heating, and she grins wickedly. “Never,” she returns, stretching out in a way that’s meant to seem leisurely but just presses her body closer to his.

“Do something about it then.” The words are practically growled into her ear, and she feels the spark of arousal that he’s been stoking since she woke up as it blazes into a full-fledged fire.

The thin-handled grip that she’s maintained thus far on her control starts to slip, and Klaus must see how it terrifies her, how suddenly her knuckles turn white and her eyes widen. His hands find hers, and she finds herself pressed into the mattress, immobilized with his weight over her, and suddenly blue eyes lined by a thin ring of gold are all that she can see.

“Caroline,” he tells her, repeating it once more as she snaps into place. “Are you alright?”

Licking her lips, she tries to focus. “Fine, fine,” she babbles, “I’m fine.” The words are barely more than a stutter, and Klaus would know she was lying even if he couldn’t hear the uptick in her heartbeat.

“Breathe with me.” He takes one of her hands and moves it to rest on his chest, just above his heart, and she tries to match him breath for breath. Concentrating on the heat of his skin and the metronome of his lungs, how each inhale leaves her a little calmer, a little more capable of restraint.

When she’s steadier, not as wild in the eyes, Caroline tries to let herself relax and release the line of tension that has wound its way down her spine once more. “What’s wrong with me?”

Klaus gives her a half-hearted smile. “Like I said. You’re still hungry.”

He’s right even though she wishes he wasn’t, and she can’t deny it. Not when he’s lying on top of her and she’s broken open in the morning light, forced to confront the fact that she’s missed him. They have so much to talk about, because she knows that she won’t be able to leave without having a conversation about what this means for them. He’d let her if she tried to escape, but she thinks it would hurt him in a way that he’d be reluctant to admit.

Her mind is spinning, trying to figure out the best course of action, but she finds that her every thought is stopped in its tracks when he leans down to kiss her. Gently, with none of the nearly vicious wildness that they’d shared over the previous night. As though she could ever be fragile.

Sighing, Caroline shifts a little to wrap one of her arms around his neck. He goes easily when she pulls him in, and she loses herself easily in the kiss, the push and pull of his lips and tongue.

Eventually, they move further beyond mere kissing, and she bites down on his neck with blunt teeth as she adjusts to how he feels inside her. Every place where they touch makes her thrum with satisfaction, perfectly content to let him take the lead and set the pace. This is the first time she’s had him in such a way: passionate and so slow as to be almost agonizing, like she’s something to be cherished and cared for, like this morning could be the first of a thousand or more of its kind. 

The coil of anticipation that hadn’t fully relaxed its hold on her overnight slowly slips away without her notice, but she ignores the hunger that still lingers. Focuses instead on the roll of their hips, the rhythm that he builds, how her name is a gasp, only half-voiced, when she meets his ministrations with her own.

Their movements are those of lovers, familiar and accustomed. 

Caroline thinks that she wants to know everything about him, wants to know not just his body but his mind. The fact that he’s always offered himself up to her so plainly is only something to be grateful for. She can find no unease within herself at the prospect of finding herself here, however it came to be.

Her hand finds its way to the place where their bodies meet, fumbling against her clit with shaking fingers as Klaus kisses her again, deep and comforting. When she comes, her orgasm washes over her in waves, pushing her until she’s fallen over the edge of a precipice she hadn’t realized was so close. Klaus follows behind her, his breath punched out on an exhale.

-x-

They must have drifted back to sleep after, because when she wakes up in his bed for the second time, sun floods the entirety of the room, no longer casting the weak rays of the early hours. She curls into him, shutting her eyes against the light as a smile fits itself onto her mouth.

“Any better, love?” Klaus asks, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her to fit more securely against his chest.

In a way that reminds her of waking up after the witch had changed her, she takes stock of her mental state and how her body feels. Her breathing is calm, no longer labored from having to show restraint, and her bones don’t feel hollow with a hunger that threatens to unseat the control she’s worked so hard to maintain. Plus, she always appreciates having her hair played with.

“I feel fantastic,” she whispers, rolling her shoulders out. She hadn’t realized how tightly wound she’d become over the last few months. Klaus has been the first real meal she’s had since Paul, and he woke up afterwards. An infinitely better experience. Not to mention how much more filling he was.

He grins and she feels it against her shoulder before it fades and he adjusts to where she can see his face, the debauched array of his curls and furrow of his brows. “You were ravenous; I’m not surprised. If you’d told me how bad it had gotten on the phone, I could have met you halfway.”

Because of course they haven’t properly seen each other in years and the first thing that he wants to do is pick a fight. 

Reaching up and resting a hand against his jaw, Caroline tells him, “I’m still new at this. I hadn’t realized it was that bad.” It’s only partially a lie, and hopefully not enough of one that he’ll call her on it.

His frown doesn’t lift, and he clenches his jaw when she tries to soothe him. “You could have hurt someone,” he snarls, which is so out of character that it’s shocking.

Klaus doesn’t care about people. He never has; it’s one of the many recurring arguments they’ve had over the years. She gets worked up because he puts people in unnecessary danger, and it’s startling to have the tables turned so suddenly, to realize that she was the danger in this scenario.

“Why do you care?” she bites out, and she knows that her eyes must be flashing.

Never one to heed a warning, he only gets further in her space, and his lips brush against hers when he tells her, “I don’t.” 

She jerks back, and he answers her question before she can ask it.

“You care, sweetheart. I don’t mean to insult your control, but we both know how lucky it was that you didn’t run into anyone on the walk from your car to my doorstep.” He stares at her, taking in her reaction, and she’s determined not to give him one, not to let him know how right he is.

If she’d had to guess earlier, she would have said that she’d have gotten rid of her shame after they’d had sex. Twice, now. Instead, she had been too preoccupied by need and hunger to let it bother her earlier. There were more important things at hand then, but now Caroline’s horrified to remember the drive in from Virginia. How she’d met a cashier’s eyes through the window of a gas station and he’d started to leave his place behind the counter, halfway out the door by the time she’d gotten her car started.

She’s new at this, but that’s no excuse for putting lives at risk.

Klaus runs a hand over her arm in an attempt to soothe her because she’s never been able to conceal her emotions well enough, murmuring, “Nothing happened. You didn’t hurt anyone.”

That’s what he thinks. The memory of Paul’s ashen face comes to mind, almost too horrifying to confront, but she knows that it will never get easier. “I did hurt someone, after the witch first turned me.” Her hands shake until he covers them with his own, and she closes her eyes when she can’t stop herself from listing the excuses. “She hadn’t told me what had changed; I thought I just needed to be around happiness to feed. I didn’t know that I could _drain_ someone,” she admits, anguished. 

He squeezes her hands, just once, and she lets herself draw comfort from his touch. “She neglected to inform you of the intricacies of the spell to which you agreed to. The fault lies solely with her.”

Bonnie had said something similar when Caroline had told her about it, refusing to let Caroline shoulder the blame alone. And, yeah, she gets that it was irresponsible of the witch to not tell her about it, but wasn’t it just as irresponsible that she agreed?

“I was drunk; she asked if I was interested, and I couldn’t say yes fast enough,” she remembers, suddenly regretful. If only she’d understood the magnitude of what she exchanged.

The thin line of his mouth tells her that her words haven’t changed his mind. “She cast a spell on you while you were drunk?” he asks, and there’s an edge that wasn’t there before. “A life altering spell, and she let you agree to it under the influence?”

She already knows it was a dumb decision; she doesn’t him to keep pointing it out. She’s been living with this for months now, apparently starving herself in the process, and she didn’t come here to be scolded. “I already know how stupid and naïve I am, thanks,” she says under her breath, fully aware that there’s no chance he won’t hear.

“That wasn’t what I was trying to say, and you know it.” He sighs, letting go of her hands and taking a moment to consider his next words. “I’m going about this all wrong. My apologies.”

There was a time where she thought an apology of any capacity wasn’t in his vocabulary. 

Caroline finds that she can’t take any pleasure it in, not when she’s well aware of how much more disastrously things could have turned. She never got used to feeding on blood, neither the bunny diet nor blood bags were satisfying, and drinking straight from the vein always made her feel weird about the fact that she used to be a human and now they were just food.

If only she’d thought about how much worse it could get.

With a wry smile, Klaus gets up and gestures broadly to the room. “I’m going to find my own breakfast now. Make yourself comfortable; I shouldn’t be too long.”

Right, because just because she’s full doesn’t mean he is. Quite the opposite, since she fed on him, she realizes, but she doesn’t say anything more. Just moves to the edge of the bed and sits up on her knees to kiss him. No hunger, no ulterior motive driving the action. Just because she wants to, and she thinks that he should know that she wants him even without being moved by baser urges.

His dimples come out in full force.

-x-

She uses her time alone to shower, standing under the scalding hot water and watching it sluice down her body and then into the drain. The world feels quieter than before, but that’s only because she doesn’t ache with unmet need any longer. Hunger was constantly on her mind over the last few months, and she hadn’t noticed the extent to which it had controlled her thoughts until now that she’s able to revel in its absence.

Being enveloped in the scent of Klaus’s shampoo, using his soap to clean her body, is perhaps more intimate than they were last night. 

The memory of the morning comes back to her, slow and forceful and everything that she didn’t know she longed for. Shivers wrack her body, stemming from pleasure and not fear.

Caroline steps out of the shower and wraps a towel around herself, relieved to find that the fabric doesn’t burn against her skin. Another sensation she hadn’t noticed that built until it was so great as to be completely overwhelming. She doesn’t know how close she’d come to hurting another person, except for how she knows that it was too close. Everyone in her path over the last few months had been in danger, and she had persisted in denying that it was the case. That she could control it.

And she had, clinging to control even as it slipped away.

It only takes a moment to look around the room to realize that she’d left her bag in the car. She’d had enough foresight to pack one, but apparently not enough to get it out of the trunk fourteen hours later.

Another reminder that she had almost cut it too close for comfort. Klaus had been right when she’d first arrived. She wasn’t just hungry, she was starved. 

Flashing out to the car to grab it while dressed only in a towel isn’t exactly appealing. And while she wouldn’t be opposed to stealing one of Klaus’s henleys, the tub in the bathroom corner had caught her eye earlier. Which is how she ends up running a bath and digging through cabinets in an attempt to come up with some sort of bubble mixture to add to the water.

No dice, so she pours like half of his body wash in. It’s probably so expensive that she’d wrinkle her nose if he told her, but she thinks he won’t mind. And if he does, he can pay for it. The Mikaelsons have more money than they know what to do with; Klaus can support her bubble bath habit.

Sinking into the water, she bites her lip when some water sloshes over the edge. The tub is a clawfoot, the type that’s been out of fashion for so long that its placement in the bathroom can only be indicative of how Klaus’s tastes have always leaned just to the ornate side of classic, almost baroque. Each piece of furniture in the bedroom is a hand-carved antique, probably old enough to have been purchased when he and siblings first came to New Orleans. Maybe he’d carved some of it himself.

“I’m here,” she calls out when she hears him enter the courtyard, not bothering to raise her voice.

Klaus appears in the doorway after only a moment, nothing to indicate what he was up to except for a small bloodstain on the cuff of his sleeve. It’s small enough to escape notice unless someone is looking for it, but Caroline takes a deep breath and knows by the scent it’s fresh enough that her fangs would have dropped only months ago.

When she fed on blood, even being full wasn’t always enough to keep her from wanting the taste of it.

As it is, the sight of Klaus leaning on the doorframe, pants clinging to his muscular thighs, makes her core clench in absence of his touch. So it turns out there are similarities between the experience of hunger, after all.

He takes in the bubbles and the still-damp floor of the shower. “If you were going to become any other creature, you should have been a mermaid.”

Caroline flicks some water out of the tub in retaliation, but he doesn’t look annoyed by it. If anything, his eyes only turn softer, bordering on fondness; her heart does something funny in her chest in response. 

He gets out a fresh towel for her while she gets out of the bath, tucking it securely around her and then tugging a curl out of her bun just to be contrary. She lifts onto the balls of her feet to kiss him when he smirks, and it catches them both unaware in a way.

The sight of them in the mirror catches her off guard. She’s leaning towards him, no longer hungry but still drawn to his presence. She always has been, though, and the spell has not changed anything in that way. Even when she had been horrified by him, a girl so young that she never should have caught his eye, she’d been drawn in all the same.

“Your eyes turn black when you feed,” Klaus tells her, watching how she watches them, a voyeur to the experience they both share in.

It occurs to her to say that she was thinking about what has stayed the same between them, not what has changed, but her mouth goes dry before she can voice the admission. It seems a step further than they’ve gone thus far, and there’s a delicate balance between them.

She’d checked in with Bonnie earlier, letting her know that she didn’t need to worry anymore and that she might be staying in New Orleans for a while. The witch hadn’t seemed surprised.

“I brought up your bag,” Klaus tells her, motioning to the luggage that he’d placed next to the bed. “I thought that I could show you around, if you like.”

She thinks that she might be blushing. After all that he’s seen of her and the implication that he’d like for her to just spend time with it is what takes her aback. “You did promise me a tour,” she says, remembering the voicemail that he’d left her with all those years ago.

The barest hint of gold bleeds into blue irises. “I always keep my promises.”

-x-

“What do you know about the witch who did this to you?” he asks that night, once they’ve feasted on gumbo and eaten beignets while looking out over the river.

He hasn’t just built a kingdom here, she’s discovered. He’s found a home in this city, knows it so well that every street has a different story attached to it. Not just Bourbon Street and Jackson Square. Every corner has secrets and tales attached to those mysteries, and Klaus could reveal them all to her.

She thinks that she might let him.

Caroline shrugs on first impulse, because the truth of it is that she doesn’t know much. “We met at a bar in the Manhattan underground, and she asked me about how I found life as a vampire.” She thinks back to that night, recalling the woman’s locks of flaming red hair that had only been auburn in the shadows of the bar. Her eyes had been piercing, green emeralds that she’d felt all too comfortable revealing herself to. 

It’s almost nothing, but it’s apparently enough to satisfy him.

“Are you trying to find her?” She and Bonnie had talked about trying to track the witch down only to determine they just didn’t have enough information. “I never even got her name.”

Klaus smiles at her, showing the barest hint of fang as he does so. “Sweetheart, while that might make things a touch easier, don’t delude yourself into thinking I’d let something as trivial as the lack of a name keep me from what I want.”

The fact that he knows his power so plainly reminds her of who he really is. 

Klaus Mikaelson, Original Hybrid and the nightmare of countless creatures. How many plots against him have there been? Caroline wonders what it means to know the depths of a person’s horrors, to know the cities they have razed and the people they have hunted, and to forgive them. None of his sins are hers to absolve. What kind of monster is she that she’s able to look past them, to see only the man before her who wears his heart on his sleeve so blatantly?

“Do you think she’d be able to undo the spell?” Hope must be written plainly across her face, because while they’ve found a solution, she almost misses her appetite for blood. She doesn’t know how comfortable she is with depending on him entirely for sustenance.

With a small shrug, he gives her an expression that’s more than a grimace. “She’d be able to give us more information, at least. I called in a few favors; we should hear something within the week.”


	3. The Best Thing I've Seen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You don’t just feed on lust, love. You generate it. It’s a rather ingenious way to ensure your survival.”
> 
> It can’t be true, not when all Caroline has ever longed for is to be wanted for the person that she is. Now she’ll never know if that’s true or if it’s a reaction that she’s created.
> 
> “No,” she whispers hesitantly, because Klaus is looking at her as though this is something that shouldn’t come to her as such a surprise. As though she should have known all along what this was between them.
> 
> “Please don’t feel that you’ve taken advantage of me, love, when I’m quite certain that it’s entirely the other way around.” His lips twitch as he says it, but not as a sign of enjoyment.

The Abattoir is a compound with more secrets than rooms, though it’s lacking in neither. There are bound to be guest rooms, or at least the rooms that his siblings use when they stay here that are surely vacated. She hopes those rooms are empty, at least. The thought of any of the Originals having overheard anything that took place last night is so mortifying as to make her wonder if starvation would have been a better option.

If she comes down tomorrow to the sight of Rebekah lounged on a chaise, smirking knowingly at her, she reserves the right to find whatever splinters of White Oak are left in the world.

Klaus shrugs it off when she asks about his siblings. “They’ve been called away,” he says simply, which is an explanation that’s such a non-answer it clearly indicates there’s something more going on.

“Is the supernatural world going to shit, or just traveling?” Caroline asks, narrowing her eyes when he doesn’t look at her, eyes firmly glued to a book that supposedly could have some type of answer. She’s doubtful, both of whether the book could help and in whether he’s being honest.

He’s suspiciously tight-lipped. “Something like that. I believe Kol is somewhere around central America given his most recent post cards.”

That’s one sibling accounted for, which leaves Elijah, Rebekah, and Finn. And Freya, Caroline reminds herself, having never met the eldest daughter in Mystic Falls. “And the others?” she prompts when he falls silent once more.

When he finally looks at her with one eyebrow arched in such a way that it looks skillful, Klaus tells her, “Finn lives in Ireland. Is there a reason for your sudden curiosity about my siblings’ whereabouts?”

Two siblings accounted for then, not that Finn was the one she was particularly concerned about. Elijah, with his handkerchiefs and Windsor knots and tailored suits, would surely be the worst to run into this type of situation. Caroline felt underdressed when she stood next to him in a ballgown at the Mikaelson mansion all those years ago; she can’t imagine being able to meet his eyes if he walked into Klaus’s room while she was only wearing a robe. Or, worse, nothing at all.

Or maybe the worst sibling would be Rebekah, who would make the kind of comment that would be so acidic that Caroline wouldn’t be able to stop herself from rising to the bait. It’s not often that Caroline thinks of herself as the high school queen bee that she once was, but Rebekah brought it out in her so easily then.

“Just trying to figure out how much privacy we have,” she decides at last.

Klaus looks at her before setting the book aside. “My siblings have been informed that I am otherwise occupied and to not be disturbed. You don’t need to worry about any potential interruptions.”

She squints at him, waiting for him to follow it up with any more information. When she’d called him, he told her that his sister could be there in an hour to help, which means that Freya, at least, had been in New Orleans. Elijah and Rebekah probably were as well, given his refusal to say anything further about them. Which means that he’d thrown, at minimum, three of his siblings out of the family home after he’d gotten off the phone. All with only the barest impression of what she’d required of him.

Caroline thinks about how she met him when he was a thousand years old and she had only just turned eighteen. Klaus had looked at her then in exactly the same way as he’s looking at her now. Soft, curious, with something vulnerable in his eyes. 

She’d been out of her depth when she first arrived, and while she feels the same way now, it’s for an entirely different reason. 

Without another word, she follows Klaus to the bedroom they’d spent the night in the previous night, the one that undoubtedly belongs to him. If she were lying to herself, she’d say it’s because her bag is already there, the mattress is comfortable, she doesn’t want to risk any of the other showers being more difficult to operate.

The truth is easier, though, and the truth of the matter is that she wants to sleep next to him.

Just sleep next to him. That’s the plan, or at least it is until she sees him coming out of the bathroom after a shower, curls still damp with a towel slung low on his hips. The dip showcases his obliques, and Caroline catches herself running her tongue along her lip in interest. 

Klaus jerks his head up to meet her eyes, the barest hint of gold threading through his vision. “Some party trick you’ve got there,” he informs her, lust rolling off him in waves.

His words are enough to confuse her to the point of distraction, even as his energy pulses like a living thing that she craves to fuel further.

“What are you talking about?” She hadn’t been aware that she was doing anything.

He gives her a look that’s half incredulous, half concerned. “You don’t know what you’re capable of.” A look of annoyance passes briefly over his features before he schools them back into understanding with effort. “She truly told you nothing of your new nature, and of course you haven’t explored. Too terrified of hurting others, so scared of yourself that you arrived here famished.” 

Sitting up against the pillows, Caroline watches him with narrowed eyes. They’ve already discussed this; she thought there wasn’t much more to say on the subject. “My apologies if I wasn’t comfortable seeing if I could drain every horny vampire I could find,” she snaps, because it wasn’t like she’d gotten an instruction manual.

“Any vampire you found would have tripped over their own feet in an effort to offer themselves up for the taking,” he tells her, running a hand over his face in exasperation. “You don’t just feed on lust, love. You generate it. It’s a rather ingenious way to ensure your survival.”

She shakes her head to reject the notion before she can think too hard about it. It doesn’t matter that it makes sense, that she remembers Bonnie bashfully telling her they couldn’t be in the same room. Stefan had complimented her stuffing so sincerely over Christmas, even to the point where she thought he was trying to get himself back into her good graces. That cashier at the gas station had been lured to her through only eye contact.

It can’t be true, not when all Caroline has ever longed for is to be wanted for the person that she is. Now she’ll never know if that’s true or if it’s a reaction that she’s created.

“No,” she whispers hesitantly, because Klaus is looking at her as though this is something that shouldn’t come to her as such a surprise. As though she should have known all along what this was between them.

He comes to hover close to her, but she jerks back before he can reach out.

If she can make him echo her feelings across the room, surely physical contact must strengthen that connection. The day replays through her head with heightened awareness of the pull to him that she’s always felt, trying to think of every touch. From waking up curled into his chest to every brush of their hands as he showed her the French Quarter. He’d kissed powdered sugar from the corner of her mouth after spinning her in the street to the melody that a jazz musician played on the corner.

Her throat feels dry. Not from hunger or from needing blood, rather from the understanding that she’s manufactured every part of this visit without trying. Of course there’s a reason for why everything had gone so perfectly. 

“Caroline,” he says, only a few steps away. The distance is purposeful, and his tone is stern, almost chastising. Her disappointment must be so obvious as to be palpable. “I am well over a thousand years old. I am perfectly aware when I feel an emotion that is not of my own making.”

Looking at him through her eyelashes, she notices the line of tension that he carries with noticeable effort. Bitterness seeps into her voice as she says, “Even if you can identify it, you just said it still affected you.”

Klaus moves for her immediately, kneeling in front of the bed and resting his hands on hers, holding them tightly so as to not let her pull away. “Your emotions only serve to amplify those which I already have for you,” he tells her, earnest and tender in a way she’s never dared to dream of. “Whatever fires are in me that you stoke, it was I who first lit them.”

Just his touch helps to ease her, and Caroline finds herself nodding after considering the facts at hand.

She’d called him over the phone to tell him of her hunger. There’s no evidence that her reach extends to anything beyond the physical realm, and still he had told her that he would be there. For whatever she needed, for however she needed him. Their conversation had been only simple acceptance once she had put his worries about her safety to rest.

“Please don’t feel that you’ve taken advantage of me, love, when I’m quite certain that it’s entirely the other way around.” His lips twitch as he says it, but not as a sign of enjoyment. He watches the place where their hands are linked, rubbing his thumb across the skin within reach in a motion too careful to be said to be mindless.

Once, there was a time where she would have said that gentleness did not come naturally to him. He has changed over the years they have been apart.

Who is she that a creature so set in his ways after a millennium would change them for her? Caroline feels the same way that she did when they talked about the witch, unsure of herself, constantly aware of him, questioning his every intention.

Every decision that she could make feels wrong, like she wouldn’t be considering all the things at play.

When they finally go to sleep, after he’s talked her into not going looking for another room, after she’s pretended that she could want anything other than him, she only just restrains herself from building a wall of pillows to put between them. Instead, she clings to the edge of the mattress, determined to not seek him out over the night.

-x-

As it turns out, her focus is all for nothing. She wakes up with her body pressed firmly against his, stirring at a sensation that thrums through her body without permission.

Klaus is trying to extricate himself from the bed without her notice, but he does a good job of not shifting her from her spot on the bed while he moves backwards. It’s only when his hips change position and she feels the same sensation, stronger this time, that she realizes what woke her. 

Turning her head to watch him, to see the guilty look that creeps over his face, Caroline smiles. “Can I help you with something?” She sways her hips slightly into his to get her point across.

The physical touch is good, but even better is the spike of arousal that shoots through him. 

His laugh is more of a snort, something so undignified that she hadn’t thought it expect it. It makes the experience all the more genuine when he reaches over to touch her cheek, to watch her when he leans forward to capture her lips in his. Slowly, the anticipation building, giving her every opportunity to read the play and escape before they come into contact.

She dips the slightest bit forward and takes advantage of the gasp that he gives. His mouth is soft and yielding on top of hers, sleep-warm and careful as he moves his hand to back of her neck to hold her there. His touch is gentle and tender as his fangs unsheathe themselves, and he scrapes them cautiously along her lower lip.

Klaus licks away the drop of blood that beads up, and he pulls away to stare at her with golden eyes, a question.

Even if she wasn’t sensitive to the type of energy that he’s giving off right now, Caroline thinks that she’d have been able to connect the dots. She rolls on top of him and pushes him down when he goes to sit up, moving down the bed and helping him remove his boxer briefs. 

“You don’t have to,” he warns her once, ever the gentleman, and she cuts him off by licking a stripe over the head of his cock.

That gets him to shut up.

“Just so you know,” she says, one hand reaching back to tie her hair up, “I’m not doing this because I’m hungry.” They don’t need any further points of confusion.

That said and her hair taken care of, she gets back to it, laving her tongue over him again. He curses when she finally takes him into her mouth. She feels his pleasure start to take root in herself, something that reminds her of their first night together when she practically accosted him in the courtyard. 

She hadn’t known what to make of it then, couldn’t think of anything beyond the physiological need that had driven her to seek him out in the first place. Even after they’d finished, she’d fallen asleep too quickly to give much thought how she had felt his every desire and her own twine together. Now, it’s something new to explore, worth the curiosity that she pays it.

With a moan, Klaus sinks a hand into her hair, loosening the strands from where they’d been tied back. His fingers against her scalp are rough and all the better for it, no gentleness to be found.

Taking him deeper, she shifts her knees apart and keeps one hand on his hip to steady herself. The other makes its way to her soaked folds, parting them easily and sinking two fingers into herself without pause. 

The noise that he lets out is indecorous and everything she could have hoped for. Better still, is how he keens when she licks over the head and curls her fingers. The experience is delicious in how they bleed into each other, a feedback loop that she wants to go on and on, and she thinks that her veins would be clearly on display if it were blood that she hungered over. 

Klaus’s other hand comes down to clutch at her shoulder in a warning that she doesn’t heed. Just speeds the rhythm up, making it quicker and dirtier, aiming to suck him off with an intensity that leaves him gasping.

He does gasp, nails digging in, and Caroline revels in it. When he spills into her mouth, her body takes in the energy that escapes, pure power sinking into her veins, sweet and heady.

“You’re a menace,” Klaus breathes out, and she presses her laugh into his collarbone as she makes her way up the bed once more. “Last night, you had no idea of the tools at your disposal. Only a few hours later and you’ve already learned how to manipulate them to the best of your abilities.”

It’s a fair point, but she teases him, “I’m sure I could get better, given the opportunity to practice.”

Catching him off guard is a wonder. It is intoxicating, to sit in front of him and know that there’s no place he’d rather be. She thinks she could get addicted to the feeling. She thinks she might already be.

His eyes glint, all cobalt and shadows as he helps her out of the nightshirt she’d worn to bed in a fit of modesty. “Let me give you the opportunity to practice,” he returns magnanimously, a hand reaching between her legs to slide into her, his thumb bumping against her clit at an angle that must be hell on his wrist but lights her up from the inside.

The earlier orgasms she had from him came without pause or warning, hunger more than arousal serving as the driving force. Caroline finds that she usually takes a little more time, requires a little more build to get there. 

Her breath hitches when he withdraws and then comes back with two fingers, the stretch of it glorious and filling. She keens when he crooks them in the right way, trying to talk him through it with encouragements and giving up when it seems that he doesn’t require them. Her body shows Klaus the way, and she kisses when him when he brushes against the place that has eluded others. The gasp that he draws out of her makes him repeat the motion, stroking her firmly.

Caroline falls apart on his fingers, sucking on his tongue and falling completely into pleasure. The catch of the barest edge of his thumb nail on her clit is what sends her spiraling into orgasm, a shock that stuns her momentarily into forgetting the confines of her body.

She comes back to herself as he strokes her through the aftershocks, and she bites her lip to keep from moaning any complaints at the loss of him. Klaus stares down at her with a dark-eyed intensity that shouldn’t be surprising but still manages to be.

They settle into a kind of routine, something Caroline never would have thought to be possible before. That being said, she finds that it makes a kind of sense. In Mystic Falls, ages ago now, Klaus had found time for his own enjoyments amidst the chaos. Looked at her with laughing eyes and a smile that was tempting even when she hadn’t wanted it to be, even when he was terrorizing the town.

He sends her that same smile when she catches him in one of the many studies, a book perched in his lap that must be older than she is.

Living in his space is new and strange. Caroline hasn’t lived with anyone since she graduated from Whitmore. She’d hugged Bonnie and Elena goodbye, clinging to them only slightly longer than necessary, and then she’d gone to make a life for herself among the supernatural community.

If she’s being honest with herself, she’d thought about going to New Orleans before. She’d stopped herself every time not because she thought she’d be unwelcome, but because she didn’t know if there was any going back once she got there. She doesn’t know if that’s the truth of their situation now, doesn’t know that she’d want to leave even if Klaus didn’t taste like caramel, sweet and salted, on her tongue. 

The feeding situation is tricky. They’ve mostly managed to smooth the bumps over, and Klaus has made it clear more than once that he’s always available for whatever she needs.  
“It’s not exactly a hardship, love,” he’d said with a wink.

She thinks that she might have turned positively vermillion in response, blood rushing into her cheeks as she’d tried to come up with anything to say in return. He’d taken pity on her and left the room soon after, saving her the embarrassment of tripping over her own words.

There’s still a couple of things that bother her, though. Beyond just the fact that she’s become a creature who feeds on sexual desire and that Klaus is the only supernatural being she’s strong enough will survive her. Other things trip her up – things that once seemed small, but now take up entire trains of thought, until she’s laying awake wondering what he meant when he said he felt like he was the one taking advantage of her.

That can’t be right.

The words twist through her mind while she tries to find their true meaning, because she can’t understand them. No matter how many angles she looks at their situation through, the truth of the matter is that she’s the one who’s exploiting him. 

Klaus certainly isn’t a reluctant participant, but that doesn’t mean he’s getting nearly as much out of it as she is.

Finally, she feels like she’s being driven slowly mad, doomed to never be surefooted in their interactions until she’s uncovered the significance that eludes her. He might hem and haw while she pulls it out of him, but he doesn’t keep things from her. As surprising as it may be, it’s true.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” she admits, toying with the plastic beaded necklace she’d been given outside. Mardi Gras is next week, and New Orleans is in full swing as the peak of their season approaches, coming even further alive with the colors of celebration. She’s been leaving the windows open to let jazz music penetrate the Abattoir, finding joy in the notes that make their way inside from the French Quarter. 

Looking up from his book, Klaus looks wholly unsurprised. “Ah, are we finally going to talk about what’s been on your mind?”

Caroline ignores the passive-aggressive nature of the barb, continuing, “What did you mean when you said you felt like you were the one taking advantage of me?” 

His eyes snap to meet hers, dark blue but only just. There’s a feeling of control that surrounds him, like he’s only just holding back. His monster always lingers directly below the surface, but it isn’t often that it can be seen so plainly while still being concealed. 

“Surely, you must be joking,” he finally informs her.

If anything, that only serves to make her more annoyed. “I’m the one feeding from you.” Pointing it out feels useless, because they’re both perfectly aware of the situation they’ve found themselves in.

With a cocked eyebrow, he gives her a nod. “And I’m the one letting you rather than seeking out an alternative solution, one that doesn’t leave you at my mercy.” The words sound like they cost him something, not as freely given as she might have once assumed. “So you must understand that I’m not as generous as I might appear to be.”

Her hands twitch to touch him, to reach out and press against his skin, soaking in every drop of power that he’d let her. She tamps the urge down. “You sent out minions, called in favors. All to look for a witch whose name I don’t even know if I ever knew in the first place, to find the origins of a spell that doesn’t resemble anything like we’ve ever seen before. You haven’t left to go hunt anything down because there’s nothing to hunt, and you wouldn’t risk leaving me behind even if there was.”

Caroline knows that she must have been crazed when she first came to him, desperate for his touch. In the photos Bonnie took of everyone gathered together for Christmas, her skin is sallow and there are bags under her eyes. It would be another month before she drove to New Orleans.

If he left, she doesn’t know how long it would take for her to get to that point again. She’s steady now, constantly full, but they’ve also been around each other continuously. There’s no baseline for them to make an estimation with.

Klaus clenches his jaw, tension seeping into the air, and he grits out, “I would have preferred that you come to me out of your own desires and not through necessity, but I’m not so selfless that I would refuse you in either case. Do not think me a good man, Caroline, when I have done nothing more than submit myself to your every craving.” His eyes bleed gold into the blue, and he is more wolf than man. He always has been, masquerading among humans in a costume that can barely contain his power.

Her heart pounds in her chest, because she’s always known this. She hasn’t always been ready for it, wasn’t when she was newly eighteen and looking into the eyes of a man who promised her the world if she so much as asked. She doesn’t know if she’s ready now for that kind of devotion, nearly half a century later, but thinks for the first time that she wants to be.

“Let’s even the scales then,” she suggests, knowing before she says it that the idea is insane. 

Shutting the book he’d been reading, he places it on the end table and sets his hands on his knees. It’s a deliberate motion, finding a place for them that isn’t reaching out for her. “I’m listening.”

Pulling her hair off of her shoulders and up into a ponytail, Caroline makes it so that her neck is on blatant display. “Drink from me.”

The strength of the arousal he gives off from the words is enough to make her feel drunk with it, and she stumbles towards him as his want washes over her, weak in the knees. His taste is overpowering, honey-sweet with a depth of flavor that she can’t identify.

When she loses her balance, Klaus is there to catch her, and his hands on her skin don’t make concentrating any easier, but she tries all the same. “Don’t offer anything that you wouldn’t want me to take you up on,” he tells her. The look is his eyes is unknowable. 

“I mean it.” She only just gets the words out before she kisses him, fingers working at the hateful buttons of his shirt as she does so. When she has to pull back for air, gasping for it, she tries to get the last vestiges of her thought out before she can’t focus on anything else. “If I’m only going to feed from you, it’s only fair that you get a taste as well.”

His eyes go golden, not a trace of blue left. “Fairness, love,” he starts impetuously, “would imply that we would feed exclusively from each other. You would be mine in every sense of the word.”

One of his hands grasps at the plastic beads of her necklace, twisting it to keep her close. The string that the beads are tied on is pulled taught, a clean line of tension that connects them.

All she wants is their clothes off, his need driving her to distraction, but Caroline knows this is more important than whatever instant gratification that sex might give her. Blood sharing it intimate in and of itself, and the idea of feeding exclusively from one person involves a level of dependence that she never would have been comfortable with before all of this. She feeds from Klaus because she needs to, because he holds her survival in his hands. This would be a choice, on both their parts, a sign of commitment that she doesn’t know she could take back.

She reminds herself of his earlier words, about not making offers she didn’t mean. “I want you,” she whispers, the words scarcely stronger than a breath but no less true for the softness with which she utters them.

“I want _everything_ ,” Klaus returns, “and I won’t be satisfied with anything less.”

She had plans, she thinks to herself, a life that she was going to live before finding him. She isn’t ready for the type of things he wants from her, but she doesn’t know that she ever will be. “Yes,” she agrees readily, without hesitance, clawing at his newly unbuttoned shirt to move it off his shoulders and down his arms. “Yes,” she answers, “to everything.”

He surges forward to kiss her as plastic beads scatter to the floor, shoving at her dress with a ferocity that reveals his eagerness. The fabric rips, torn from her to flutter in tatters to the floor, but Caroline just shudders in the cool air, pressing forward into his warmth. 

Over the first days that they spent together, she had been wild for his touch, uninhibited by her desires. Tonight, Klaus is much the same way as she must have been.

Leaning down to suck at her nipples through the lace of her bra, he lets blunt human teeth work them into points while she grinds her hips down on his lap. His hardness is evident through his pants, the thin layers of cloth between them doing nothing to disguise it.

“You’re wicked,” he tells her, but he glows with it.

Caroline doesn’t bother to say that’s how he likes her best, because that’s plain enough, just sinks her fingers into his curls to tilt his head up into another kiss. There haven’t been secrets between them necessarily, but this is the first time they have been completely laid bare before each other. She would not have it any other way. 

They don’t bother with the bedroom because the couch is solid beneath them, and Caroline doesn’t give him time to move once she’s divested him of his pants and he’s ripped her underwear off. She digs her nails into his shoulders as she takes him inside her, and her bitten off moan is muffled into his neck.

She rides him mercilessly, too single-minded with the purpose to be concerned about making it last. Her rhythm is harsh, but he meets it well, and the sting of his fangs piercing the thin skin of her necks comes as a welcome shock. The pain is minimal when met in the face of this much pleasure, enough to overwhelm, and she tips her head back and shifts her hips restlessly. 

Each mouthful that he pulls from her only serves to make his desire ever sweet, and she feeds from him greedily in return. They are both at full strength, at the peak of their power, and she is no longer the damsel in distress, too weak to keep from being fed on without awareness.

When he pulls back, drops of her blood still lingering on the corners of his mouth, Caroline dives forward to lick it off, the taste metallic and still warm from her veins. It does not matter that she doesn’t need it for survival anymore. She is incapable of not wanting every part of him, even the parts that she once would have flinched away from. The truth cannot be hidden between them, and she would not want him to try to conceal himself from her.

Klaus changes their position, sweeping her into his arms and laying her out on the couch so quickly that the next thing she’s aware of is his face over her as he slips back into place. His thrusts are grounding, and she’s so close that she’s dizzy with it.

“Drink, sweetheart,” he tells her, and she unsheathes her fangs to sink them directly into his throat.

His hips stutter at first contact, and the swell of his lust is enough to take her with him, both of them at the mercy of the other.

-x-

When he told her that he was searching for the witch, a week was the earliest estimation that he’d give her. As it turns out, his sources come back later than expected, and it’s three weeks after her arrival in New Orleans before Caroline finds herself staring at a familiar leather-bound grimoire with more than a little trepidation. 

“She’s dead,” Klaus announces unceremoniously.

He sounds disappointed, like he would have enjoyed weaving threats and making good on them for a woman who probably thought she was only giving Caroline what she’d asked for. Plans of bloodshed and penance have been foiled before they’ve even truly begun, and they’re left only with this book that hopefully holds some kind of answer. Caroline doesn’t expect to find a cure at this point. She’s been in the supernatural world too long to have held out much hope for escape clauses.

“How did she die?” she asks, curiosity getting the better of her. Witches can make just as many enemies as vampires, sure, but the woman had seemed both friendly and powerful, a combination that usually indicates a long and relatively happy life.

Flipping through the book, he arrives to a nearly blacked-out page in the middle. “Did she look any worse for the wear after the spell she cast on you?” 

Thinking back to it, yes, the woman had seemed a bit more haggard. Bags under her eyes, rumpled hair, but Caroline chalked it up to being up all night. “It just seemed like a typical hangover,” she remembers with a shrug.

Klaus’s eyes flash so quickly that she almost misses it, and he hisses, “You let a witch cast on you while she was drunk?”

“In my defense, I was also drunk,” she points out, realizing afterwards that it only makes it sound worse.

In a show of great restraint, he rolls his shoulders back and looks down at the book once more. Next to him is another sheet of paper, one his sister had dropped off after translating the spell. “She put her life force into it. All magic has a price, and this spell demanded that from her. A slow drain, not immediate, something that ensured you would survive long enough to feed for the first time.”

A chill runs through her that has nothing to do with the air. “She didn’t even know me; we only met that night. Why would she sacrifice herself to turn me into,” she waves at herself helplessly, “this?”

He motions to the other book on the table. Not a grimoire, but a journal this time. “She was apparently a very old witch. There are things that can be done to keep appearances young, but even potions meant to extend life cannot change the fact that witches are mortals. She would most likely have died within the year anyway.” 

“But why give the rest of it to me? I told her that drinking blood sucked, and she decides that I seemed like a nice enough kind of people to die for?” Caroline can hear the worry that leaks into her words, knows she’s working herself up and can’t seem to come down from it. 

Grabbing her arm, Klaus pulls her in to lean against him, and she rests there, hovering above his collarbone. The act reminds her of the night before, when he’d drank from her and she’d felt exhalant in the most glorious of ways. 

“She hated vampires. Apparently, her coven died at the hands of one, and she was determined to end the species. Made it her life’s work. The spell was her own creation, something she worked at for years.” He strokes her arm comfortingly, continuing before she can interject, “Did you tell her that you didn’t wish to be a vampire?”

Blinking, she tries to remember. “I told her that my transition wasn’t a walk in the park. And that I thought compulsion was sick since I’d had it used on me as a human, but I didn’t tell her I hated it. Just that I hadn’t exactly wished for it. Katherine didn’t do a lot of explaining prior to the murder part of the evening, if you know what I mean,” she jokes, looking up to see that his gaze has gone steely.

“Who compelled you?” The words come out as a growl, low and threatening.

She isn’t doing this. She’s never planned on telling him, and especially not while Damon is still alive. The decision would be so much easier if she didn’t have to worry about the retaliation that Klaus would surely seek. “I don’t want to talk about that right now,” she says at last. 

He turns to face her more fully, and she grabs his wrist hard enough to draw blood when his pupils dilate.

“If you compel me,” she starts. The beginning of the threat hangs in the air between them, incomplete because she doesn’t know how to end that sentence. She’d still need to feed, and there isn’t anyone else she trusts herself to not drain. That being said, he would destroy the trust they’ve built between them, and they both know it.

“I’m sorry, love,” he allows, breaking her gaze almost shamefully. When he looks back at her, it’s steely once more. “You will tell me, though. When you’re ready.”

When Damon’s been locked away in the Salvatore family crypt, maybe then. She makes no promises.

Klaus takes a steadying breath and flips through the journal again. “Apparently the task of finding a vampire who doesn’t enjoy the experience is easier said than done. She must have been getting desperate, knowing that her time was running out. You would have seemed like the best option, or at least the only one.”

That’s ridiculous. She loves being a vampire, even if it’s had its drawbacks. 

“What does the spell say? Is there a way I can go back to being a normal vampire?” Caroline asks instead, drawing her attention back to the sheet that holds Freya’s translation.

He seems hesitant to tell her, but when she reaches for the sheet he says, “When you first called me, you said that she’d made you into a hybrid. How sure are you of that?”

Arching an eyebrow, she gives him a pointed smile, her extra-sharp canines on display. “I’ve still got the fangs; I still need the daylight ring.”

“Do you?” He reaches for her hand, toying with the ring that Bonnie had first made for her after her transition, and she thinks she’d have flinched if he was anyone else. It’s Klaus, though, and as villainous as he had the potential to be, he’s never been the villain of her story.

“I haven’t taken it off,” she admits, because it’s the type of survival tool that she isn’t going to risk being caught without.

He motions to the paper in front of them and tells her, “This spell was meant to transform you entirely, to make you insatiable. You would have been drawn to powerful creatures and left their desiccated husks behind, forever driven to crave that which could never fully satisfy you.”

Her eyes blink rapidly for a few moments, because that can’t be right. “I got hungrier each time, but I never let myself hurt anyone else.” Her first feed was the only notable exception.

The smirk that fits onto his mouth is distractingly handsome. “Your witch had the misfortune of choosing the only vampire who values life, in all forms, above anything else. You were strong enough to abstain from feeding almost completely. And while I maintain that you shouldn’t have let it get to that point, I don’t know that it would have made things much better.”

Thinking back to when she had first undergone the change, she tries to remember how quickly the hunger had crept up on her. After the first time, when she’d left a vampire drained in her bed, it had only been days before she’d felt it again. The feeble orgasms from humans had never been filling.

“I’m not hungry now.” They’ve been having sex regularly enough that she doesn’t know if she would feel it, but even when she tries to focus there’s nothing. No emptiness that comes even close to that which had carved out a place in her bones like when she’d first arrived. “I mean, I’m totally satisfied, and the spell says I never should be. So, it only partially worked. I’m still a vampire like we thought, just a different food source.” She groans at the realization. “We haven’t learned anything.”

Klaus narrows his eyes and studies her for a moment. “Does it hurt when I bite you?”

She pauses to think. There had been pain, but it was mostly clouded by pleasure. “Of course it hurts.”

His mouth twists, half-smirk, half-grimace. She isn’t used to seeing him look conflicted. “My fangs hurt, sweetheart. Can you feel my venom, though?”

The memory of her first hybrid bite is sharper than her fangs have ever been. The pain had been almost disabling, the hallucinations vivid, and Klaus’s blood had been all the sweeter for it. The second time, when he’d bit her in a fit of anger, it hadn’t been any better. Since he’s been feeding from her, she’s felt the sting of the puncture, but no poison has traveled through her blood.

Caroline reaches up to touch her neck where he’d drank from her last night, and admits, “No.”

There had only been a few minutes between when he’d first bit her and then when he’d given her his blood, but she knew that it would have been more than long enough to feel the bite take hold. 

“I’m not a vampire anymore, am I?” she asks, and she doesn’t know why there are tears in her eyes. 

With only a moment’s hesitation, he inquires, “Have you compelled anyone since the change?”

It’s the kind of thing that most vampires do on a daily basis, but he knows that Caroline only does it for emergencies, isn’t surprised in the least when she shakes her head.

He takes her hand and squeezes it, letting go only when she draws it back to remove her daylight ring and place it on the table. There isn’t any natural light where they’re standing, but she reaches over hesitantly towards the streak of sunlight coming in through the window. When her skin passes under it, she can’t stop herself from flinching, but no sizzling sound follows.

Even with the evidence of the hybrid bite, she doesn’t know that she believed it. Now, though, she knows.

“I don’t think there’s any undoing it,” Klaus tells her reluctantly.

There’s still a thread of hope that she clings to. “I still have my fangs. And we already talked about how the spell clearly didn’t do everything she wanted it to. I’m not… Insatiable.” 

The word used in the spell seems odd to her at first, but she remembers being famished on her drive in, not being able to stop herself when Klaus met her in the courtyard. The promise of his touch had been the only thing she was able to focus on those last hours, able to bypass exits filled with people who would have been tempting under any other circumstance. 

He reaches up to scratch his head, mussing his curls in the process. “Ah,” he says at last, his finger traveling down a few lines in the spell, “I think your fangs just have a new purpose.”

Leaning over to read, Caroline gets the gist within a few words. Bite, blood, ecstasy. “We didn’t notice…” she says at last, because they’d been expecting it. It had come as no surprise that the Original Hybrid had been into blood sharing.

“As for the hunger, I had thought the same. It turns out that your witch was kind enough to leave you with a loophole. I’m assuming that she had to include one, that she wasn’t powerful enough to close it out permanently. I believe you found it without trying, if I may be so bold.” He sets Freya’s copy on the table and kisses her briefly, but he seems distracted. “Come find me, after you’ve read it.”

Klaus gives her a smile and makes his way out of the room, and she’s torn between wanting to go after him and needing to know what has stopped the spell from taking hold. 

The grimoire calls to her, though, so she lines the translation up with the original text and tries to make sense of the spell. Freya has written it out in English, but the language still old, the kind of old that Caroline always hated grappling with in her high school literature classes. She tries her best anyway, figuring that she can always ask Klaus if anything trips her up.

She’s either better at reading comprehension than she thought, or else she’s so familiar with the effects of the spell that she doesn’t have many questions through the first two thirds of the text. It’s a winding spell, drawing nature’s energy and the witch’s life blood in exchange for that which Caroline would no longer need. The last stanza, the one that binds Caroline to an insatiable urge, leaves the opening that Klaus had mentioned.

Her mouth forms the words as she reads them, but she finds that she can’t say them aloud. 

The paper crunches when she clenches her hand around it, and she marches out of the room to find wherever Klaus has hidden himself away. She makes her way through half of the Abattoir before realizing that his intention wasn’t to hide at all, and that he’s waiting for her in the bedroom that has become theirs.

“This doesn’t change anything.” Caroline is shaking, can’t stop herself, doesn’t know how to convince him that he should looks past it.

He reaches out a hand and she takes it gratefully. “A love that transcends hunger,” he tells her, echoing the line from the spell.

“I’m not here because of some unquenchable thirst, or because you’re a loophole,” she says, because surely he must know that. She couldn’t remember the spell, couldn’t have known that there was a way out. She doesn’t even know she’d have come to him if she had, too concerned about making an obligation out of their relationship to risk it. “You’re not a way out, or a method of survival. Not to me.”

Pulling her onto his lap, Klaus tilts his forehead until it meets hers, until all that she can see is the blue of his eyes. “I know that, love,” he assures her, but it’s a feeble attempt. 

If it were anyone else, she would feel cheated, never convinced that she would ever be wanted for anything more than the power that she carries with her. Klaus has always wanted her, though, even when she was a teenager in more than just appearance. She isn’t staying because he’s the escape she’s been offered, but rather because she thinks that they would have found themselves here after a certain length of time anyway. No spell is going to take him away from her.

When she bites her lip, his eyes track the movement. “Like I said, this doesn’t change anything. I still want this; I still want you.”

“Do you?” He asks it like he can’t help himself, like it’s tearing him apart.  
Caroline’s hands are tentative when her fingers card through his curls. “In whatever way you’ll have me.” It is the kind of promise that is grand, sweeping, the kind of gesture that he would have made for her when they first met. She knows what she offers him, knows the hold he has over her that has nothing to do with the spell she’s fallen victim to.

He kisses her greedily in response, and she thinks his arms are the only place that she feels like she truly belongs. She sinks into him, clinging to his every touch, and there is nothing monstrous about what they do to each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we've come to the end! I'm going to doing some more outtakes from Tethered, and I'm in the process of working up some stuff for the AU event coming up!

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [helpless-in-sleep](https://helpless-in-sleep.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, come hang out and scream about Klaroline with me!


End file.
